Journeys of a quilter in art, dyeing, and handquilting.

Screen Printing with Dye

Sunday morning, my friend Christa came over to play screen printing with me. After my previous experiment with screen printing last fall, I was hooked. Except I didn’t like using paint. This time I wanted to try dye.

Christa mixing her dye colors.

Luckily, friend and fellow dye enthusiast, Kim of Follow Your Bliss Quilting, came to the rescue. She lent me already mixed dyes with sodium alginate and urea, screens, pull thingies, books on screen printing and more. Thanks Kim! A trip to Dharma might be in order for me, to purchase more supplies. Fun.

Christa deciding on her next placement.

Christa is a masseuse, and wanted to screen print some wall panels to hang in her studio. She chose a tree image, that reminded me of an african sahara tree.

Squeezing dye onto her screen.

While her fabric was soaking in soda ash (chemical to help bond the dye molecules to the fabric molecules), Christa painstakingly cut out her stencil onto wax paper (as I didn’t have any freezer paper on hand) with an exacto knife. Kudos to Christa for extreme patience and skill!

Pulling the dye across the screen.

When I asked Christa what color she wanted to make her trees, she exclaimed, teal!

Fabric and dye curing in front of the heater.

After the screen printing was done, we rolled the panels in plastic, to keep them moist and warm to cure for 24 hours.

Rinsing screen printed fabric in cold water and synthrapol.

And tonight, I got to rinse them out! They came out fantastic. I hope Christa likes them! Hem them and put a rod sleeve on them, and she will have two lovely wall hangings.